Yes, yes it is. I know because it has happened, is happening, will happen. I know only from the place where nothing is actually happening. From here, no. Not necessary.
Thought is the trip...my god, the prisons, the palaces, the amusement parks! Questions, answers, constructs, deconstructing. Seeking. Growing. Dying. Exhilarating, exhausting.
(Just now, the music in the background of my typing: Mind can't comprehend the magnitude of the moment...)
...So it builds, and destroys, and through the replaying of these stories, creates a journey I can call "my life". Never mind that when I turn the spotlight of thought upon itself, I can't find it. Not a trace. People say, "This book/house/life is a product of my thinking, my imagination." Languaging and imaging, plus some kind of physical manipulating, makes stuff, and more thinking...or so the story goes.
Well, all the thinking in the world can't explain itself. Standard thought eternally avoids the holy-jumping-off-place, where the journey takes a sudden dive into the void. Usually, it's some kind of sales pitch that resists the pull to the edge, armors and defends its position. Sometimes, a line of thought hardens into a philosophy or religion. Even if the bars of such a cage were once relatively easy to escape, maniacally devoted followers will have fortified it beyond all recognition. It hangs like a desperate, temporal monument to eternity on the edge of The Edge, until it goes the way of all such dead ends.
When thinking matures, it tends to simplify, for efficiency's sake. It may begin to consider itself, to entertain its own paradoxical nature, notice its creation of and dependency upon duality. This is a slippery place. Thinking begins to doubt itself as the font of all wisdom, the healer, or the pioneer. It isn't as special as it once believed, and, in fact, seems to be born to create problems with one hand, which it must solve with the other. The place where thinking is most useful is in the realm of practical being--how to get from point A to B on a map, how to add up the phantom digits of currency in exchange for a meal, how to make a comfortable bed for a tired body. Thinking, it turns out, is a great innkeeper, but a lousy psychotherapist, shaman, or relationship advisor.
Intellect is, however, a Way. Thinking can invent and lead itself to the gate, and take the final step through it...into dissolution. The gate is beyond any moral or spiritual position, and is indeed a kind of "positionless position". Standing in that invisible entrance, no position can really describe love, dreaming, trees or war. It can't locate a beginning or end, because it can never get outside itself. It can only ceaselessly divide. As great a muscle as thought may be, it is only, and always, thinking.
Then what? What a thought!
A leap to a death. The church falls off the edge. The angel opens her eyes, and becomes a holistic emptiness in the middle of a drinking-in, pouring-out dream. The broken pieces of thinking lying around are like interesting fossils--beautiful, judgmental structures, fear-based, love-based. They have nothing to do with discovering where she has always been.
Fresh thoughts appear, generous and innocent. What is this sight that is the start and finish of a nautilus? Is it thinking, dreaming or both/neither? Suddenly, thinking is poetry, pilgrimages to its own vulnerability, forays in which the rest of itself--body, heart, world--are not only invited, but reveled in. There's no packing armor anymore, no unsafe territory, no looking out for an enemy, no competition among different forms of mind. Thinking and feeling are choiceless as weather.
Aaaahhhhh . . . exquisite, dear Maria
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